Efficient user-assisted content distribution over information-centric network

Abstract

To solve the fundamental limitations of current Internet in supporting today's content-oriented services, information-centric networking (ICN) concept has been proposed. ICN has attractive features (e.g., name-based routing, in-network caching and multicast) supporting efficient content-oriented services. However, the attractive features may not be fully utilized by all existing contents due to the resources limitation, which means additional technique may be required for improving content-oriented services. In this paper, as one possible way for this, we examine P2P technique exploiting user resources in ICN. We first examine how P2P looks like in ICN. Then, we introduce the contribution-aware ICN and corresponding incentive mechanism to utilize the user resources efficiently. We also show how the contribution-aware ICN can be implemented over the existing ICN architectures. Through simulations, we evaluate an effect of user participation on the content distribution performance in ICN. We also verify the feasibility of the contribution-aware ICN in terms of resources utilization efficiency. © 2012 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.